Those Pictures   I leaf through the book. Photos. Black & white. Wide-eyed moments of grace, an unnamed war, stately decay, dead men, failures of light, teenagers with guns laughing through mascara smoke, blood but it’s silver. Lovely blood. I was there, he says — I saw. Yes, it’s so: he’s a prodigy of witness. This mud, he says, grinning. You’re in here, too — I know you know my ex. He points — a beauty too soon gone to hell, hollow-eyed, a mess beside a man (it’s not me). When you went there, I ask, when you married her, did you know she was a junkie?                                              Oh, sure, yes, he laughs, but I didn’t know what it meant.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont May 2011